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ASUS MATRIX GTX285 Review

Testing:

Testing the MATRIX GTX285 will consist of running the card through the OverclockersClub.com suite of games and synthetic benchmarks to test the performance of the Matrix against many popular competitors to gauge its performance. The games used are some of today's popular titles to give you an idea on how the cards perform relative to each other. The system specifications will remain the same throughout the testing. No adjustment will be made to the respective control panels during the testing with the exception of the 3DMark Vantage testing where PhysX will be disabled in the nVidia control panel. Clock speeds on each card are left at stock speeds. I will test the MATRIX GTX285 at both stock speeds and then overclocked to see how much additional performance is available when you choose to overclock the card to see if it indeed is the fastest single GPU card on the market.

Overclocking:

Overclocked settings:

ASUS MATRIX GTX285 737/1606/1353

Overclocking the MATRIX was accomplished by using the iTracker overclocking utility from ASUS. After looking at ASUS ENGTX285 TOP model earlier this year I was curious to see if the voltage adjustment capabilities in the iTracker software made a difference in the abilities of the MATRIX vs the TOP. What I found is that at stock clock speeds the two cards offer pretty similar performance since they are clocked pretty similarly. By using the iTracker software I was able to push the MATRIX higher than the TOP by a bit. Roughly 30MHz higher on the core and 13MHz higher on the memory while the shader clocks were a bit slower at 1606MHz. All in all, not too much of a bonus. What is a bonus is the ability to change the memory sub timings. Doing this does offer an increase in performance and is another avenue you can take to increase the performance if this card in game. The way to get the most from this card is to manually set the fan speed to anywhere between 85% to 100%. By doing so you keep the core as cool as possible. By using a larger heatpipe on the heatsink ASUS has increased the cooling capacity of the factory solution. When overclocked and overvolted the core hit a max temperature of 65C while looping game test 3 in 3DMark06 for 30 minutes.